15 Pollution and Bioremediation
Pollution and Bioremediation
Achieving sustainable life, for humans, animals, and the environment, requires a plan of action to mitigate anthropogenically-induced damage and develop future practices to maintain planetary homeostasis. One of the biggest threats to ourselves and the environment is the buildup of human waste and pollution (e.g. plastics, oil, synthetic products, etc.) that take a tremendously long time to naturally breakdown. With the human population predicted to continually climb, continuing the same destructive practices will only result in more waste generation in a fraction of the time that it takes for decomposition. One alternative means to solve the pollution problem is to use specialized microbiomes for bioremediation. That is, a specially designed microbial consortia could clean up (i.e. breakdown and assimilate) various toxic molecules much more quickly. However, this will take time to understand how and which type of microbes could perform these tasks and if there are any associated (negative) effects.
Alternative Strategies for Microbial Remediation of Pollutants via Synthetic Biology
Article by Jaiswal and Shukla, 2020 licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY).
Continuous contamination of the environment with xenobiotics and related recalcitrant compounds has emerged as a serious pollution threat. Bioremediation is the key to eliminating persistent contaminants from the environment. Traditional bioremediation processes show limitations, therefore it is necessary to discover new bioremediation technologies for better results. In this review we provide an outlook of alternative strategies for bioremediation via synthetic biology, including exploring the prerequisites for analysis of research data for developing synthetic biological models of microbial bioremediation. Moreover, cell coordination in synthetic microbial community, cell signaling, and quorum sensing as engineered for enhanced bioremediation strategies are described, along with promising gene editing tools for obtaining the host with target gene sequences responsible for the degradation of recalcitrant compounds. The synthetic genetic circuit and two-component regulatory system (TCRS)-based microbial biosensors for detection and bioremediation are also briefly explained. These developments are expected to increase the efficiency of bioremediation strategies for best results.
Introduction
The remediation processes aided by microorganisms present at the various contaminated scenarios constitute bioremediation (Basu et al., 2018; Kumar et al., 2019). Microbial remediation uses multiple metabolic pathways responsible for enzyme production (Sharma B. et al., 2018; Dangi et al., 2019). These enzymes mainly take part in the degradation pathways of xenobiotics (Junghare et al., 2019). There are different customary methods for bioremediation, primarily based on the site of bioremediation, in and ex sit